Corcelli Receives NSF CAREER Award and Sloan Fellowship

Steven Corcelli, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry has been named the recipient of a 2009 received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award worth more than $500,000 for 2009-2014. The Faculty Early Career Development Program is designed to support the integration of research and education. Corcelli’s team will work to characterize water dynamics at DNA interfaces, and a new required course, “Mathematical Methods for the Chemical Sciences,” will be added to the curriculum for sophomore Chemistry and Biochemistry majors.

Corcelli’s team, which includes two post-doctoral students, three graduate students and five undergraduates, will conduct two complementary studies that will elucidate the extent to which water confined in the major- and minor-grooves of DNA exhibits dynamics that are different from the bulk, which will advance the fundamental understanding of water at DNA interfaces. Discoveries could have therapeutic applications. The new course will focus on probability and statistics, differential equations and linear algebra, core topics critical for success in upper-level chemistry courses. Students will gain greater mathematical sophistication and aptitude, an appreciation for the role of mathematics in chemistry, and increased confidence to address chemical problems with mathematical tools.

“The proposed mathematical methods course will have a substantial impact on the training of Chemistry and Biochemistry majors at the University of Notre Dame,” Corcelli wrote in his peer-reviewed proposal to the NSF. “By integrating research into the course through a computational module, the students will learn how mathematical and computational skills can be utilized in the context of an exciting multidisciplinary research problem.” He expects to recruit undergraduates from the course, from the Nano/Bioengineering and Physics NSF REU programs at Notre Dame, and from Saint Mary’s College.

Corcelli has also received a Sloan Fellowship, a $50,000 grant from a private foundation that, like the CAREER Award, aims to support professors early in their careers. The money will be used for research that, using a new method called transition path sampling (TPS) to model chemical systems, will study charge transfer reactions. Corcelli expects to develop a new method, nonadiabatic transition path sampling (NAPS), that will provide more information about the reactions. The study could have application in solar fuel cells and other materials used to help meet energy needs.

Corcelli, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Brown University and a Ph.D. at Yale University, was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin before he came to Notre Dame in 2005.